The phone assistant

The phone assistant answers your business line when you can’t — under a sink, up a ladder, driving — so a caller who wants somebody today reaches somebody rather than the next number on their list. It takes down the work, the address, a name and a number, can book a visit from the times you have published, and puts every call in one queue for you to act on.

Add call answering

The phone assistant is an add-on: Call Answering, $19 a month on any paid plan, however many calls come in. There is no per-call charge and no allowance to watch, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.

Add it from Profile → Billing, with Add call answering. It goes on the same subscription as your plan, as a second line on the same invoice. A business on the free plan subscribes to a plan first, because the add-on sits on that subscription.

The phone number itself has a small monthly charge from the phone company. It is shown on its own line, marked as a carrier charge passed through, so you can see which part is ours.

Get a number

Once call answering is on, the owner chooses a number in Tools → Phone Assistant → Settings. Leave Area code blank for a toll-free number, or enter an area code for a local one, then Find a number. Each number shows what it costs a month before you take it; Take this number leases it to your business.

A business holds one assistant number. If a number can’t be leased, the page says so and nothing is charged. A manager can see the number but only the owner can take or release one.

Forward your existing line to it

You keep advertising the number your customers already know. Ask your phone provider to forward it to the assistant’s number — usually called call forwarding in their app. Most providers also offer conditional forwarding, which forwards only when you don’t answer, and that is the setup most businesses want.

Your existing number is not moved or changed, and you can stop forwarding at any time.

Choose when it answers

The assistant is off until you switch it on. Under When the assistant answers on the same page there are three choices:

• Never — the default.
• Outside the hours I answer my own phone — you set the hours you answer, day by day, in your own time zone, and the assistant covers everything else. A day with no hours set is covered by the assistant all day. A window has to end after it starts, so a business that works nights sets two windows rather than one that crosses midnight.
• Always.

When the assistant is not answering — switched off, inside your own hours, or with call answering lapsed — the phone rings through to whatever you had before. It never picks up just to say it can’t help.

What a caller hears

Every call starts with the assistant naming your business and saying it is an assistant. That is not a setting: callers always know they are not talking to a person.

It then works out four things, in whatever order the caller gives them: what the work is, the service address, the caller’s name, and a number to call back on. A caller can say everything in one breath or answer one question at a time. If it doesn’t understand something, it asks once more, then moves on and keeps what it has — a caller who couldn’t get their address across can still leave a good phone number. A caller who asks for a person is told somebody will call them back.

What it will not say is just as deliberate. It never quotes a price, never promises an arrival time, and never says whether you will take the job. The only exceptions are the ones you set up yourself, in the next section.

Nothing is recorded as audio. Each call leaves a written transcript, so you can read exactly what was said. It belongs to your business like every other record: it is in your data export and it is deleted with your data.

Let it book a visit

With online booking switched on and bookable services published, the assistant can do more than take a message. Once it has the work, the address, a name and a number, it matches the work to one of your bookable services and offers the next three times your availability would show on your public page. The caller picks one, can ask for later times twice, and the visit is booked — instantly, or held for you to confirm, whichever your booking setting says. The assistant tells the caller which.

If the service has a published price, the assistant reads it once, in your own wording, before offering times. It says no other figure.

When it can’t match the work to a service, or the address is outside your service area, it takes the details down instead, exactly as it would with booking off. An out-of-area caller is never hung up on.

A caller you already know can be greeted by first name — see Recognize a returning caller.

Work the queue of captured requests

Everything the assistant takes down lands in Captured Requests, beside Leads in the menu. The queue opens on Waiting, and each row shows how long the caller has been waiting, their name and number, what they need, whether the address is In area, Near edge or Out of area (with the distance), and when they called. A caller whose number matches a client you already have is marked, so you don’t enter the same customer twice.

Open one to see What the assistant took down and The conversation, the whole transcript. From there:

• Convert to lead carries the details across to a new lead marked as having come from a phone call. Every field can be corrected on the way through — an address heard over a bad line is exactly the thing to fix before it becomes a record.
• Dismiss needs a reason. A dismissed request is kept under Dismissed, and Convert anyway is still there if you change your mind.
• A request the assistant booked is already on your calendar, with a link to the job. One held for your confirmation is confirmed or declined in For you.

Nothing in the queue expires, and nothing becomes work until somebody makes it work. The count of what is waiting is the honest measure of how fast calls are being returned. The queue is for owners and managers.

Cancel call answering, or release the number

Cancel call answering is in Profile → Billing. The assistant keeps answering until the end of the period you have paid for, and the page tells you the date. On that date your number goes back to the phone company and calls to it stop reaching you, so stop forwarding your existing line before then. Adding call answering again before that date keeps everything as it was.

To give the number back without canceling, the owner uses Release this number in Tools → Phone Assistant → Settings. Anybody who calls it afterwards reaches nothing, including customers who saved it and anywhere it is printed. It can’t be undone: the number returns to the phone company and may be given to somebody else.

Add it, or put it away

Phone Assistant is one of the tools your business chooses: the owner adds it, or removes it, under Tools in the main menu — see Your tools. It answers your number, and texts a caller after a call it could not finish, only while it is on. Removing it deletes nothing you have recorded; add it back and everything is where you left it, its settings included.